Education isn't enough to rid neighborhoods of nuisances

Posted: Thursday, September 05, 2002

Commissioner Linda Ford's Aug. 29 letter defending the Mayor's and Commission's record on protection of our neighborhoods has unwittingly drawn attention to the underlying cause of neighborhood decline: the Mayor/Commission's policy of ''compliance through education.''

According to that policy, our local enforcement agencies are to give warnings, not fines, to those who violate neighborhood ordinances. The goal, according to Ms. Ford, is ''to bring people into compliance as quickly as possible, not to generate revenue through fines or criminalize citizens.'' Commissioner Tom Chasteen took the same position recently on a local radio show.

Most citizens of our in-town neighborhoods, and now many in our suburbs, know that policy to be a complete failure. The following statistics reveal the alarming scope of the problem:

1. According to Municipal Court records, during the period 1997-2001, Athens-Clarke County (ACC) brought to court only 30 cases for violation of the ordinance allowing no more than two unrelated individuals in a single-family residence. Yet a 2002 study by the Friends of Five Points has documented more than 100 prima facie violations of this ordinance in a mere two week period in only one area of ACC. There likely have been several thousand such violations since 1997.

2. Statistics from the ACC Police Department show that neighborhood ordinance complaints have steadily increased over the period 1999-2001 from 5298 to 5807 to 6113 (17,218 complaints in all). Yet a mere 1.7% of these complaints led to a citation. The same pattern almost certainly would emerge from the Marshal's Office if records were available.

So much for the goal ''to bring people into compliance...'' The ACC ''education'' policy has undermined every neighborhood ordinance in our city and county, while the only education violators have received is that neighborhood laws can be disobeyed with impunity.